Elected on a campaign platform of economic stimulation, French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s rejection of the country’s “imposed 35-hour workweek” was not a surprise.

But Gilles Lecontre, the chief executive of Paris-based economic consulting firm Intercessio, told the Associated Press that the 35-hour workweek was "a very bad thing. It devalued work, it's unhealthy and difficult." Likening any attempts to have employees work longer hours to "haggling over a carpet with a rug merchant," he is not extending workdays at his firm for now.

The 35-hour workweek was adopted in 1998 to attack the country’s unemployment problem. Indeed, with fewer working hours per employee, employers were compelled to hire 350,000 more workers between the promulgation of the new law and 2002.

Yet Sarkozy condemned the idea and other elements of the socialist agenda as constrictive to the French economy. But some economists, such as Nicolas Bouzou of research firm Asteres, pointed to a slump in job growth since the initial hiring boom. "For the whole 10-year period, the net result was zero," Bouzou told the AP. Bouzou continued to point out, however, that the possibility of more hours worked would contribute only a projected 0.3 percent to economic growth in 2009.

The reform means that the “reference week” will stay at 35 hours, but the law now enables individual businesses to negotiate the length of the workweek with its unions and end compensatory vacation days for overtime, offering overtime pay instead.

White-collar unionists protested the decision in Paris in July. The Scotsman explains why executives stand to lose the most from the reforms: “Under the old rules, employees who worked overtime were able to exchange the extra hours worked for days off. … Mr Sarkozy’s determination to extend the working week spells the end of all those long weekends for the country’s managers.”

According to The Economist, strikes are a French tradition and unions have “an entrenched official role on company works councils and in industry-wide collective bargaining.” But the union protest against Sarkozy, thanks to careful strategizing, “has lost its edge.”

France24.com cited the insignificance of reforms, predicting that they will take time to enforce and “will have limited impact.”

Despite the new law, French businesses have been loathe to change their policies. However, France’s move in 1998 to institute a mandatory 35-hour workweek inspired other Western European countries to follow suit. In 2003, Belgium capped workweeks at 38 hours. Germany set an under-40-hour workweek through collective bargaining. From 1996 to 1998, Finland tried a 30-hour workweek in a handful of cities in a bid to reduce unemployment.

France’s new conservative government has ended a decade old socialist policy; the reform passed in July “lets companies ignore the nominal 35-hour maximum and negotiate—or impose—longer hours for staffers.” However, Time magazine reports that there is “a glaring incongruity in the law: while it allows employers to demand that workers spend more time at work, 35 hours remains the reference length of the French workweek.”

The 35-hour workweek was established by the socialist government in May 1998 to combat unemployment. The European Industrial Relations Observatory includes a graph explaining the amount of money granted per employee by the government to fund the program. These monies were deducted from employer’s social security contributions.

From 1998 to 2002, the shortened workweek created 350,000 new jobs. The reform bill, according to the BBC, “was supported by the Senate’s centre-right majority but opposed by the opposition Socialists.”

Philippe Jaeger, president of the chemical industry section of the CFE-CGC explains the varied reactions to the reform: “In big companies, no-one wants to renegotiate the 35 hours and re-open Pandora’s Box,” he said. “But in the small and mid-sized firms, it will be different.”

France24.com reports, “For all the furious argument, many economists say Bertrand’s proposed changes to the 35-hour week will have limited impact compared with two earlier batches of reforms. Those included tax breaks for firms and employees for overtime work and allowing employees to choose cash rather than time off in exchange for overtime work.”

According to the Economist, Sarkozy’s tactics for weakening the power of unions include barraging them with so many reforms they can’t organize a focused protest, but also treating some union leaders “as grown ups.” With regard to Sarkozy’s approval ratings, “The French may no longer like [Sarkozy] much, but they approve of his reform …[w]ith his popularity already so low, he has little to lose by being bold,” the magazine reports.